


Teenage Dreams

by Philosopher_King



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Anal sex (fantasy), Bondage fantasy, Dubious Consent Fantasy, Hand job (fantasy), Horny Teenagers, M/M, Masturbation, Minor Aang/Katara, Oral Sex (Fantasy), Sexual Fantasy, Underage Character(s)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-22
Updated: 2020-11-22
Packaged: 2021-03-09 20:00:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,805
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27671696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: Away from Katara on Avatar business and camping near Pohuai Stronghold, fifteen-year-old Aang indulges fantasies about the Blue Spirit.
Relationships: Aang/Zuko (Avatar)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 107





	Teenage Dreams

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a Zukaang fanzine. Something of a prequel or companion piece to [Dynamic Metamorphism](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25150258/chapters/60940858), an installment in my [Zutaraang series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1652515), but neither is necessary for understanding the other.

Three years after the end of the war, Aang was finding himself feeling perversely glad that he had only been twelve years old when he’d had to master three elements in less than a year and save the world from a power-mad Fire Lord, because if he’d been just a few years older he would never have been able to focus. Even as a twelve-year-old, his mostly chaste budding feelings for Katara had made it difficult enough. Frankly, he didn’t understand why Avatars were usually told of their destiny and sent to begin learning their duties at the age of sixteen, because sometime after his fifteenth birthday it seemed his body had all but completely commandeered his higher faculties.

Maybe if Gyatso and the other monks had been alive, they would have been able to teach Aang how to sharpen his mind and cut out this particular source of distraction from the material world. He had been considering taking another trip to the Eastern Air Temple to see if Guru Pathik had any advice… but he was still too embarrassed. The Guru surely would not laugh at him—at most he would get that gleam of mischief in his eye and lilt of amusement in his tone—but would he be judging him all the same? And what would Aang tell his friends about why he was going back to consult the Guru about chakras? He certainly couldn’t tell them _which_ chakra was acting up…

Katara, at seventeen, understood the problem, and (fortunately for him) even shared it, at least in some measure. They had not yet consummated their relationship in the way that husbands and wives did in the other nations, but they did spend quite a lot of their alone time kissing intensely, in varying states of dress, with their bodies (including their hips) pressed close together, or reaching under each other’s clothing to achieve the same effect with more precision.

But their various duties—Katara’s to her family and her Tribe; Aang’s to the whole world—meant they could not always be in the same place, and when he was away from Katara, Aang spent far more time than he was proud of alone with his hands. He knew Katara would understand that, too, and that she must have been doing some of the same (she had even told him, blushing playfully, that she had discovered some creative uses for waterbending in his absence). But what he could never tell Katara was that she wasn’t the only one he thought about when he was alone. He wasn’t sure he dared to tell Guru Pathik, either, even if he were to seek his help… and the fact that the Guru would probably be able to tell that he was holding something back, not being completely honest, made him all the more reluctant to go to him for advice.

In truth, Katara was not even the one he thought about most often when he was alone. Not because he didn’t want her—of course he did, madly and passionately—but because most of the time he _had_ her, so there was no need to indulge in fantasies when she wasn’t there. No, the person he fantasized about most often was the one he didn’t and _couldn’t_ have in reality.

After the earthquakes and the battle with General Old Iron in Cranefish Town, Katara decided to go back to the North Pole to continue her training with Master Yugoda in the use of waterbending to heal. She was competent, of course—Aang wouldn’t be alive if she weren’t—but she had realized that the difference between competence and mastery might be able to save more lives and spare people unnecessary pain during the healing process or from incompletely healed injuries.

There was plenty for Aang to do while they were at the North Pole. He attended some of Katara’s lessons with Yugoda, who was far less resistant than Pakku to sharing her knowledge with a student of the ‘inappropriate’ gender; he continued his own training in combat waterbending with the warrior corps that Pakku had trained; he went exploring in ice caverns with Momo and tried to befriend mostly indifferent turtle-seals.

He was just getting the slightest bit restless when he began having strange dreams in which Hei Bai, then Fang, then Kuruk’s reflection in still water tried to show him something, to alert him that something was wrong. After the third such dream, he went to the Spirit Oasis to mediate into the Spirit World to try to find out what was going on. He found Fang and Hei Bai (they seemed to have made friends, curiously), who still could not speak to him, but led him to where Kuruk sat beside a still pool in a forest clearing. He told Aang that there was a disturbance among the spirits in Hei Bai’s forest near Senlin Village. From the Spirit World, he couldn’t tell precisely what the problem was; they were the spirits of a place in the physical world, so Aang needed to go there to communicate with them.

Aang told Katara apologetically that he had to go do his Great Bridge thing, but he should be back in a week or two at most, and she shouldn’t let it disrupt her training. She assured him that she understood, and they did some of their usual intense kissing and pressing and touching the night before Aang took Appa—leaving Momo to keep Katara company, as he often did—and headed southwest.

Senlin Village was too far to fly there in a single day; Aang and Appa had to stop and rest for the night on the northwestern peninsula of the Earth Kingdom that had been wholly occupied by the Fire Nation during the war. They both remembered the abandoned hillside villa in the ruins of Taku where they had sheltered after the storm when Sokka had gotten sick, and then Katara had caught the illness too, and Aang had to go to the herbalist and find frozen frogs for them to suck on.

But of course the other thing he remembered was being captured while searching for the frogs and taken to Pohuai Stronghold nearby… and then being rescued by the stranger in black with the Blue Spirit mask, who turned out not to be a stranger at all.

Images from that night often figured into the fantasies that Aang wove for himself when he was alone. Sure, he sometimes pictured Zuko as he was when he taught Aang firebending during the last few weeks of the summer of the comet—his shaggy hair loose, barely long enough for a topknot; still thin from his months of deprivation; earnest, apologetic, still unsure of his footing but willing to let Aang help him find it. Those fantasies were warm, tender, and usually involved firebending practice: Zuko stepping close to correct Aang’s form, then suddenly leaning down to kiss him… or perhaps Aang would feel a telltale hardness against his backside as Zuko adjusted his stance, and he would step away in horrified embarrassment, then Aang would tell him it was all right—the feeling was mutual.

Or sometimes he pictured Zuko as he was now, self-assured and regal in public but still uncertain and vulnerable behind closed doors. He imagined surprising him with a warm mouth on him under his robes of state while he sat at his desk, frowning anxiously over paperwork (Aang didn’t know exactly what he’d _do_ with his mouth when he got there, but he imagined he’d figure it out somehow). He pictured the two of them lying together, Zuko wearing nothing but the crown pin in his hair. Sometimes Aang was on his back looking up at the crowned Fire Lord… but he thought maybe he liked it better when the Fire Lord was on his back beneath _him_ , the golden flame of the crown gleaming against red silken pillows.

But somehow his imagination always wandered back to the encounter with the Blue Spirit at Pohuai Stronghold. That was when he’d first realized that he felt something for Zuko other than mystified terror—when the mask was knocked askew by the Yuyan arrow and he caught a glimpse of a dark scar on a pale face. He kept imagining different ways that encounter might (in another world) have gone… but in his imaginings, as in the ones about Zuko as his firebending teacher, he always replaced his innocent twelve-year-old self with himself as he was now, though the Zuko in his mind tended to be frozen at sixteen, even while Aang still thought of him as being older, more experienced, seemingly out of reach until suddenly, unexpectedly, he wasn’t.

Aang had brought some seaweed noodles with him from Agna Qel’a (one of the few vegetarian foods it was possible to find at the North Pole); he ate them for supper, gazing out at the sunset over the ruins of Taku, while Appa grazed in the little clearing outside their shelter. When the weather was fine, Appa preferred to sleep outdoors, under the open sky; he disliked being closed in. When the last of the sunset faded, Aang bade him good night and went inside.

He laid out his bedroll and wrapped himself in it but lay sleepless, staring up into the darkness, with heat crawling under his skin and images flashing behind his eyes of the Blue Spirit’s grinning mask and glinting swords, and the graceful, even dancer-like movements of his lithe, compact body. _Zuko’s_ body.

With a sigh of frustration at his own stupid, stubborn, tyrannical fifteen-year-old body and traitorous fifteen-year-old mind, Aang threw the blankets off, unlaced his trousers, and pulled down his undershorts. He spat into his palm before he closed it around his hardening length and started stroking it, slowly, contemplating which fantasy he would spin for himself this time.

Sometimes he pictured the clearing in the forest where he had taken the unconscious Zuko after he was knocked out by the arrow and laid his limp body on a cushioning pile of leaves. He imagined waking him as the sun rose with a long, gentle kiss and a hand in his trousers… which he _knew_ was wrong, knew would have been a violent exploitation of his vulnerability, but it still shamefully excited him to imagine it—to imagine Zuko’s eyes slowly fluttering open with a groan, then widening in shock (the right eye always wider than the left, and it _shouldn’t_ make Aang’s breath quicken to picture their strange beautiful asymmetry); to imagine him trying at first to struggle away, his own eager body betraying him, then melting into the kiss as his eyes fluttered closed again and he thrust desperately into Aang’s relentless fist.

So close to the place where it had happened, though, Aang found his mind inexorably drawn to his strangest, most shameful fantasy.

He knew what two men could do together only because Toph had told him—somehow she seemed to know everything, despite the sheltered upbringing she was supposed to have had (Gaoling’s underground earthbending scene had provided her with quite the supplemental education). It had sounded strange and unappealing at first, but Aang’s curiosity eventually got the better of him and he started experimenting with his fingers, and soon figured out what the appeal was. He wanted to do it with Zuko, as much as he wanted, someday, to have that consummation with Katara. He didn’t know which role he wanted more; he imagined himself in both, depending on his mood—both giving Zuko that overwhelming pleasure and receiving it from him.

Those imaginings had merged with his memories of the Blue Spirit and the rescue from Pohuai Stronghold to produce a fantasy that was puzzling and disconcerting even to him, the way it kept haunting his imagination, the perverse attraction it held for him. He imagined himself—his fifteen-year-old self, not the twelve-year-old he had been—in the room where Zhao had imprisoned him, chained between two columns as he had been when the Blue Spirit had found him. But instead of breaking the chains, he imagined the Blue Spirit—Zuko, silent behind the grinning theater mask—leaving him chained, helplessly spreadeagled, prowling around behind him, and pulling his trousers down below his buttocks. (In this fantasy the Blue Spirit must have defeated Zhao and the whole Fire Nation Army garrison, or else found a way to freeze time; somehow, he knew, they had all the time in the world.)

He imagined himself trembling with fear but also with a perverse thrill, asking “Who are you?” as he felt the stranger’s hard cock against his bared skin.

“You know me,” a harsh voice would whisper beside his ear, muffled by the mask and deliberately lowered and roughened to disguise the owner’s identity. Then his cock would slowly press into Aang’s ass (never mind that he knew preparation was required for it not to be painful and messy; this was a fantasy, it didn’t have to be realistic).

Aang would whimper as its thick length filled him (he didn’t have a clear idea of the size of Zuko’s cock, but, again, fantasy—he was allowed to endow it as generously as he liked). “How?” Aang gasped. “I don’t—”

“I’ve been hunting you for three years,” came the rasping voice from behind the mask, and somehow, illogically, Aang knew that he meant both the three years of Zuko’s banishment before Aang appeared, and the three years of Aang’s life since he had met Zuko, which in his mind had collapsed into the same span of time.

The not-stranger’s gloved fingers tightened their iron grip on Aang’s hips and he thrust in more forcefully, making Aang cry out—as he did in the empty villa in Taku, kneeling on his bedroll, with two fingers deep inside his ass and the other hand clumsily stroking his cock. (Fortunately, Appa had learned to ignore such sounds, after a few embarrassing instances when he had come charging over to see if the sound indicated pain and distress, and Aang had had to shamefacedly reassure him that he was fine, but he was doing something _private_ and could Appa please give him his privacy? Thank you!)

He imagined that his own bare hand around his cock was the Blue Spirit’s soft, well-worn leather glove, whose touch on his skin Aang could still feel, burned as it was into his memory by the terror and exhilaration of their escape.

“Zuko,” Aang whispered, both in the brazier-lit prison chamber and in the barely moonlit dark of the ruins, and just hearing himself say it aloud was enough for his orgasm to punch through him like one of Katara’s powerful jets of water bringing a stone wall crumbling to the ground…

_Katara._

Guru Pathik had said that guilt blocked the pleasure chakra… but it never seemed to be enough where Zuko was concerned, or else didn’t take effect until after the fact, so that the ebbing waves of warmth flowing through his body quickly turned cool and left behind a different kind of heaviness than when he was with Katara—not the pleasant softness in his limbs, but like jagged stones in his stomach.

Feeling cold, foolish, and hollow, Aang bent some water out of the skin he kept beside his bedroll to wash off his hands and dilute the stain he had left on the tiled floor, then sent the filthy water running off into the cracks between the tiles to soak in—the evidence of his guilt invisible, but still there.

When he slept, Aang dreamed again of Fang and Hei Bai leading him to a forest clearing, but instead of Kuruk sitting cross-legged by the pool, it was the familiar black-clad figure, dual broadswords in their sheath strapped across his back, the grinning mask of the Dark Water Spirit mirrored perfectly in the still water.

“Zuko,” said Aang, and the mask angled upward to look at him through its blank dark eyes, but he said nothing.

Aang swallowed. “I’m in love with you,” he said—an innocent way of putting what he felt, but true nonetheless. The mask kept looking at him, but no voice came from it. “But I’m in love with Katara, too. I don’t know what to do.”

Still the mask just looked at him, wordless as the Blue Spirit had been during the rescue three years ago. He wasn’t going to rescue Aang this time.

When Aang woke, he felt less guilty and more just… sad. The pleasure chakra was blocked by guilt, but the love chakra was blocked by grief.

Oh well; they were just dreams, waking or sleeping. Dreams didn’t have to mean anything, he told himself as he followed the prompting of his dreams to the southwest.


End file.
